Our View: Patriot or traitor?

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Posted Jun. 3, 2014 at 8:58 PM
Updated Jun 3, 2014 at 8:59 PM

Posted Jun. 3, 2014 at 8:58 PM
Updated Jun 3, 2014 at 8:59 PM

Edward Snowden, the 30-year-old computer geek who stole classified documents in his role as an employee/contractor at the CIA and the NSA and then leaked them to the press — he says to show the degree to which Uncle Sam was spying on the American people and eroding fundamental privacy rights — likes to think of himself as the former in answering that headline question.

Much of America, meanwhile, leans toward the latter, though that attitude is shifting and there is something of a generation gap, with those under 34 more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Snowden’s thought-provoking interview with NBC News anchor Brian Williams from Moscow last week may have moved a few off the fence, but for us it pretty much reinforced what we’ve thought to date: No good guys here on either side.

Not Snowden, who by his own admission broke the law — “Sometimes to do the right thing, you have to break a law” — and whose motivations may be suspect. Is he merely self-serving, out to achieve fame despite his protestations to the contrary? Is he paranoid? Is he lying?

It’s hard to tell from a television interview, but he’s obviously not the same guy who told the British newspaper The Guardian last year that “I have no intention of hiding because I have done nothing wrong,” only to find asylum in Russia, where he’s apparently discovered that a nation with a Putin in charge is no picnic, either. He’d come home — he misses his family, the quality of life and the freedoms that in many ways allowed him to do what he did — but prosecution and perhaps jail likely await him here. While he may fancy himself a martyr to the cause of forcing America to be true to itself, he’s not that much of one.

On the flip side, well, thanks to Snowden, Americans do know that their government was lying in denying it was spying on them until it couldn’t any longer. Hypocrites abound, up to and including President Obama, who sang a very different tune on this issue — and many others, as it turns out — when he was candidate Obama. He roundly criticized George W. Bush for actions with regard to the nation’s fight against terrorism that he’s done and then some. His “most transparent administration in history” simply has not been, second to none in its prosecution of government whistleblowers. That’s not exactly a confidence builder for Snowden, who says he did try to express his concerns through channels first — the NSA disputes that — only to be told “more or less in bureaucratic language ... ‘You should stop asking questions.’”

Page 2 of 2 - We’re rule-of-law fans here, not rule-of-men types, but arguably we’ve had two consecutive administrations now that pushed the envelope mightily with regard to what the U.S. Constitution permits. It’s hard to fault Snowden’s disillusionment. They won’t be prosecuted. But Snowden will, if he ever returns, voluntarily or involuntarily.

We appreciate that 9-11 scarred America’s leaders, who take protecting the nation seriously and know as few do what a difficult and awesome responsibility that is. Snowden doesn’t disagree. But he also takes issue, saying that he remembers the fear that day inspired in him, too, though finds it “really disingenuous ... for the government to invoke ... the national trauma that we all suffered together and worked so hard to come through to justify programs that have never been shown to keep us safe, but cost us liberties and freedoms that we don’t need to give up and our Constitution says we should not give up.”

As we wrote then, the great challenge to America was to fight the war on terrorism and still be able to recognize ourselves afterward. Have we done that?

Well, arguably not without Mr. Snowden’s assistance, illegal though it may have been. Had he not done what he did, we don’t think Uncle Sam would have outed himself, and ordinary Americans — far from terrorists though the vast majority are — would be blissfully unaware that their government was listening in on their conversations, monitoring their behavior patterns. We don’t think legislation would have been introduced in Congress — if yet to pass the Senate — to “rein in the dragnet collection of data by the National Security Agency (NSA),” essentially the domestic “fishing expeditions” it conducted without oversight or boundaries. We don’t think the federal government would be quite so aware of the potentially dangerous vulnerability of its own computer systems: “Their auditing was so poor, so negligent, that any private contractor ... could walk into the NSA, building, take whatever they wanted, and walk out with it and they would never know,” said Snowden.

Beyond that, he poses some intriguing questions, as he did from the beginning, about “what kind of world we want to live in.” Is it one in which cell phones are essentially tracking devices? Is it one in which there is little privacy? Is it one in which we blindly trust government to act in only our best interests, without checks and balances, and to never use the information it gleans from citizens of no threat in any malicious way?

If only our experience with power gave us confidence. For us, the answer on all counts would have to be no, as we weigh the sins of the parties involved here.